Family Literacy-Multilingual or bilingual Children

From WikEd

Definition and Introduction

 The family is the strongest element in shaping lives. 
 It's the most powerful support network there is. 
 It's where the cycle of learning begins, where 
 the attitudes of parents about learning become
 the educational values of the children. 
                   -------From the National Center for Family Literacy

Family literacy, according to the National Center for Family Literacy, "encompasses the ways parents, children and extended family members use literacy at home, at work, at school, and in their community life" 1. Family literacy is a very important part for children. Besides the time at schools, children spend most of their childhood at homes where family literacy is developed. Generally speaking, children are exposed to the concept of print initially through interacting with the environment at homes: the modeling of parents reading newspapers, the shared story reading between children and parents, or even the media including TV and computers (Li, 2002, p.147). However, as Purcell-Gates (2000) noted, family literacy, though recognized for over centuries, had only caught people’s attention in recent decades as a highlighted and fore-grounded research area, rather than a background of schooling and literacy development (p. 853).

Among these children, one group should not be neglected—the bilingual children, because different cultures may have different effects on children’s literacy at homes. According to the “Encyclopedia of Children's Health: Infancy through Adolescence”, in 2004, American public schools include about 11 million children of immigrants. Approximately 5.5 million students—10 percent of the public school enrollment—speak little or no English. Spanish speakers account for 80 percent of these children2. What are these children’s home literacy practices? What are the characteristics of bilingual children’s family literacy? Should we take into account of the culture backgrounds of the children, the expectations of the parents, the educational level of the parents, the attitude of children towards literacy, so on and so forth? What are the major problems in bilingual children’s home literacy? What are the connections between homes and schools? All these questions need the attention of relevant personnel in teaching, caretaking, and even policy making. Therefore, a synthesis of the bilingual children’s family literacy would be helpful for us to understand the significance of family for bilingual children’s literacy, as well as the problems existing in this field. There are numerous empirical studies related to family literacy, but studies about bilingual children are very few. Hence it was not very easy to collect the data sources for this topic. In order to compensate for this disadvantage, some bilingual programs that target improving family literacy in bilingual families are included in this review.

Practice

Home is the place where most family literacy practices take place. As described earlier, there are various activities that can form an environment of literacy. These home literacy practices promote young children's literacy development by providing them with meaningful social contexts to explore usage and meanings of print as well as its conventions. In the view of family literacy practice, I will look into two aspects that families encounter in the studies: the “hardware”, that is the materials in family literacy; and the “software”, the strategies that parents or siblings used.

Materials

Many researchers have investigated the specific studying materials for bilingual children at homes. For example, in Xu’s study (1999), the researcher described home literacy experiences of six Chinese ESL kindergartners. He found that among the six children, most of them lived in a print-rich environment. Some of them had English and Chinese books, coloring books, and English newspapers; others had TV set, TV guides, and electronic bilingual translator. These materials played an important role in their daily literacy improvement. Parents of these children often shared some time using these materials. This aspect also could be seen in Hurst’s study of children in Punjabi, Urdu and Gujerati speaking families in England (2001). All the children, 2 to 4 years old, were given mark-making materials, paper, writing books, blackboards or “magic slate” to practice their literacy. They used their material frequently, as Hurst observed, 15 times every day, or once to a few times a week.

Sometimes, the studying materials were connected to the physical capital of the family. People would assume that wealthier families could provide more materials for family literacy, while poorer families, less materials. Guofang Li’s (2002) longitudinal study of four Chinese families in Canada disproved this aspect. In this study, she divided the focal families into academic families that had parents working as teachers or professors in universities, and entrepreneurial families that had parents running businesses, respectively. For the academic families, though their living space was limited, the children were immersed in print, and their home environment could provide them tremendous opportunities to get involved with diverse forms of literacy, such as reading, writing, drawing, and observing parents’ print-related activities. The materials ranged from children’s books, Chinese textbooks, and parents’ workbooks, to Biblical materials, newspapers, and crayons. However, in the entrepreneurial families, where living conditions were better, the family environments were discovered to be “characterized by a lack of print” (p. 134). To be more specific, there were very few books available to children, and the restaurant home of one child did not provide any print for her “except the menus on the writing board and a couple of ragged books” (p. 134). These materials, as noted by Li (2002)that, could not offer children opportunities to become engaged in activities of reading and writing. She concluded that more physical capital did not guarantee more active literacy acquisition, and only when the capital was a resource for cognitive development can it benefit children’s literacy learning process. This finding may be encouraging for many less wealthy families to conduct family literacy for bilingual children.

Media was considered as a significant source of literacy materials by Li (2002). She investigated the media in four focal families, and found that media can be an important vehicle for literacy learning. What was interesting in her study about the boy in entrepreneurial family was that media were everywhere in his home, such as television and video media. The researcher found five TVs and VCRs at home, and two TVs and VCRs in his family’s restaurant. The focal boy owned very few books but almost all Disney video. It was indicated that by watching TV, the boy acquired oral English more quickly than other members of the family, but his reading and writing were not equally improved. What was noted at the same time was that, framed himself alone in TV, he spoke underdeveloped English and sometimes failed to express abstract ideas. In this sense, Li (2002) suggested that media were a form of contradictory material for bilingual families’ literacy.

Strategies

If literacy materials are only the foundation of family literacy, then the practices and strategies used by parents and children could be considered as more important, because they reflect the interaction between family members. Therefore, in this section, the strategies and practices of families are highlighted.

Xu (1999) in his study listed a number of strategies that Chinese parents used in their homes for children. These strategies, which included independent reading, reviewing school learning, coloring and drawing, and watching TV, were all forms of interaction between parents and children. Take watching TV, for example, unlike the boy in Li’s study (2002) who watches television alone, the children here spent watching time with their parents, generated questions related to ongoing event, and repeated words shown on television.

Many other strategies were investigated by researchers in their empirical studies. In an ethnographic and ethno-methodological study of a Spanish dominant, Puerto Rican five-year-old kindergarten boy carried out by Dinah Volk (1999), the researcher found that the siblings in the boy’s family exercised a range of strategies that included assessing/evaluation, prompting, informing, teasing, confirming, scaffolding, illustrating, directing, repetition/overlapping speech, requesting clarification, and negotiating. Most important of all, the siblings used the method of the teacher-identified recitation script and they often shared responsibility for the interactions with the kindergartner. By blending teaching strategies from their school experiences and from their culture, the older siblings helped him bridge some home-school differences in the teaching/learning process. In the classroom, the teacher used the recitation script more consistently. She usually took responsibility for teaching interactions and the children played a less active role (p. 5). The illustrations of blended strategies suggested by the researcher that more work was needed to describe and analyze the richness of perspectives and practices in different cultural contexts. At the same time, the role of older siblings in helping younger ones make cross-cultural transitions needed more attention for families and schools. However, in this study, the role of parents, instead of siblings, was not identified. We should consider the questions like what strategies parents should use that were different from the siblings so as to prepare their children for the future schooling, whether different cultures may generate different literacy strategies if bilingual children were helped by their siblings, and also the ultimate effects of taking the strategies in this study and the like.

“Reading to children” is another important strategy in western families. It is considered to be the most studied family literacy practice with respect to how it prepares children for school reading (Orellana et al., 2003, p. 17). Yet, due to the fact that in many immigrant families, the parents were not confident enough to conduct sharing story reading in English, and many other reasons, this strategy was not as common in bilingual families as in American families. However, we still could find some studies discussing this facet.

Gregory’s (1996) observation of Nicole, an English girl living in France, found that she had very good mastery of both English and French, and one of the reasons for her success was that her parents began reading stories to her almost from birth and then gradually encouraged her to do independent reading. This study indicated that being read to might be a fruitful strategy for bilingual children for their future success in language learning.

Hurst (2001) also discovered that among all the 30 children in her study who were from Punjabi, Urdu, and Gujarati speaking families, 27 reported that they often spent time with family members reading books, stories, magazines, catalogues or newspapers, which helped children to select their favorite reading materials, whether it was a story or an alphabetical book. Eventually, the interest in books indicated their later reading success.

Thornburg’s research (1993) was undertaken to test the effects of an intergenerational literacy program that encouraged parents to read storybooks to their bilingual children at home. He compared the focal children’s Preschool Language Scale (PLS) scores before and after the program was conducted. The results showed that children’s scores increased significantly after the program, which indicated that the more reading parents did with their children, the higher the children’s language scores. There were some shifts in family discourse, as well. Even though there were still some parents not reading to children at home, most parents began to mediate their children’s learning at later phases of the program.

Despite the positive sides of reading to children, there are some researchers however, such as Scarborough and Dobrich, and Teale, as mentioned by Purcell-Gates (2000), suspected how storybook reading in family literacy may influence children’s school success in their later life (Orellana et al., 2003, p. 17). At the same time, some other questions need out attention concerning “reading to children”. First of all, only a few studies have been taken in respect to reading to bilingual children, and how this strategy is conducted specifically was not investigated thoroughly. There is still uncertainty as whether or not reading to bilingual children at home was different from monolingual children’s home literacy practice. Secondly, some of the studies conducted in this field had not done any research on the subsequent results of reading to bilingual children. What the researchers did most was to predict or indicate that this strategy would foresee a promising future of the children. Such predictions were based on the literatures of monolingual children’s home literacy or the results of research for monolingual children. Finally, even the studies had taken into account of the subsequent results, like Thornburg’s research (1993) which compared the PLS scores, they were still problematic. It is uncertain if these scores could authentically reflect the language abilities of bilingual children, or even if the scores were dependable, it was doubtful whether the increase in scores resulted from the more time that parents spent with their children reading storybooks.

All the research studies above regarding the strategies were taking parents as the center of performance---that is, studying how parents and other adults prepare preschool-age children for later school literacy work (Orellana et al., 2003, p. 18). This “adult-centric” approach was challenged by the study of Orellana, et al., where an ethnographic research was done to examine how immigrant children use their knowledge of English to read and speak for their families. Researchers in this study found that para-phrasing or translating was a very common literacy practice in immigrant households. The children used various types of literacy activities to help their parents, such as scripts for participation and task operations and demands which also overlapped and diverged in school settings. The daily paraphrasing or translating, though quite different from typical middle class practices like bedtime storybook reading, appeared to be contributive to bilingual children by exposing them to a bulk of genres, domains, and forms of written text for real purposes in real occasions. This study was innovative in its account of the initiation of children in family literacy.

First Language Retention and Loss

For bilingual children, family is generally their first opportunity to be exposed to their first language. However, situated in an environment where L1 is seldom employed, bilingual children and their parents are embedded in a dilemma of the maintenance and loss of first language. On the one hand, it is usually the goal of the parents for their children to learn second language fluently and adapt to their host country; on the other hand, there is a strong feeling among many immigrant families that it is important to preserve ties with the native country and to maintain their heritage language. There is some literature focusing on this issue and most of the studies show that these two goals are not easy to achieve simultaneously. Some studies demonstrated that one of the biggest difficulties that came with first language attrition is its impact on communication in the family (Hinton, 1999). As shown in Hardman’s study (1998) of Cambodian families in America, he found that the children of one of the focal families, whose mother spoke Chinese most of the time, rarely demonstrated knowledge of Chinese literacy, which consequently brought trouble in understanding among family members. In Godina’s study (2004) of Mexican background students from Midwest America, he encountered many Mexican American students who decided to speak only English, but lived together with parents who spoke only Spanish. Also was found consistently was the denouncement of Spanish in several focal homes.

However, much research has shown that L1 and L2 are transferable for bilingual students, and the literacy in L1 may facilitate the learning of L2. This can be explained partially by the cognitive advantages that English language learners endure among different languages. One of these advantages is code-switching. According to Prerez & Torres-Guzman (2002), code switching is to change between two language systems in discourses (p, 52). Moreover, decoding that "referes to the process of tranlating a printed word into a sound" is very commong among many languages as well (Mayer, 43). Yet, from the empirical studies above, we could see that as the first and the most important discourse of first language literacy, families were not taking their appropriate tasks.

There are a number of factors that influence the maintenance and the lost of first language at homes. One of the factors was the language rejection by the children themselves, as stated by Hinton (1999). What Godina (2004) discovered also proved this point. He found some Mexican students in his study not feel like speaking Spanish and even changed Spanish names to English-like. Hinton also found that students who had lived in America most or all of their lives often simply saw no use in using their heritage language.

Children’s rejection of native languages is often related to their parents’ values. For example, in a study of the writing practices and attitudes among Chinese and Spanish-speaking elementary children (McCarthey & Garcia, 2005), researchers found that some Chinese speaking parents assigned Chinese homework, which seemed to value the maintenance of written native language; while others who played less active role seemed to worship the retention of oral native language. In addition, two researchers found the plan of the family played a critical role in the maintenance and loss of native languages. That is, parents’ plan to stay in the US or return to native countries influenced children’s view of writing in Chinese or Spanish. Xu (1999) also indicated that parents' over-emphasis on their ESL children's learning English may cause a possible loss of children's ability to communicate in native language. Therefore, in order to promote native language literacy, parents should start with simple and easy activities, like read-aloud and use of environmental print. Hinton (1999) also recommended that parents taking a visit to the homeland may give many bilingual children who might otherwise abandon their heritage language some new motivation to learn.

Community Support

 “To educate an increasingly diverse student population, 
 schools must look to families and communities for help
 in fostering academic success” (Osterling, et al., 1999, p. 64).

Communities, a sociocultural context, where bilingual or monolingual children situated themselves, could provide some of the literacy opportunities that family setting could not. However, only a few studies have been taken to examine the relationship between family literacy of bilingual children and the community surrounding them. Based on a small number of empirical studies regarding this relationship, we could see that literatures concerning this topic were not consistent with each other: some communities were favorable for home literacy development, while others were not.

In many cases, people of similar ethnic background who are linguistic minority chose to live in the same or close community. Furthermore, there are some societies for immigrants that could provide services. Both geographic gathering and social connection may provide some discourses of family literacy experiences. Wong (1989) indicated that the residence of immigrants may cause different literacy learning situations.

Li (2002) in her study of four Chinese families in Canada found that a common phenomenon in the four families’ literacy and living was their closed social world in their ethnic community and their distance from the local Canadian community. She also discovered that the academic families were more connected with the Chinese academic community, while the entrepreneurial families with local Chinese business community. The researcher concluded the opportunities of these families to learn and practice English literacy had not been sufficient. What she indicated was that geographical closeness of similar ethnic group would weaken the opportunities to speak and write the target language.

Though Wong (1999) emphasized different consequences owing to different settling location, he did not note explicitly whether the differences were beneficial or disastrous. However, in Li (2002) emphasized the lacking of practicing English within respective community, indicating that closeness to Chinese communities were not very helpful, thus overlooking the advantageous opportunities that parents could take from Chinese communities to develop the children’s literacy in their native language.

Godina (2004) in another study explored the contradictory literary practices of ten high school students of Mexican background, and found that the community setting in this study played an important role in students’ literacy development. Many students were allowed by parents to go to the library after school. Researcher learned that it was the family structure in the library where cousins, aunts, uncles helping younger kids. At the same time, the library offered students a comfortable place to read Spanish-language reading material that helped them to develop their first language literacy.

Community also is a complementary place to home for literacy. In Hardman’s study of a Cambodian family in the U.S., the researcher discovered that the public library in the community was a resource for children looking for information they could not find at homes. Library became a kind of home away from home where children enjoyed print-rich environment.

Family Literacy Programs

In order to promote the family literacy among bilingual children, there have been a group of family literacy programs for bilingual families. Only a few of them took children as the target, while most others gave instructions to parents so as to eventually improve the interactions between parents and children in literacy experiences. After synthesizing these programs, it is found that the evaluation of family literacy programs is very problematic and challenging (Purcell-Gates, 2000), and the number of literatures examining the effects of family literacy programs was relatively small. Though there are many programs of bilingual family literacy, due to limited space, only a few are listed in this entry as representatives of the whole group.

EFTL

1) Empowering Families Through Literacy (EFTL) Program. EFTL is a program that uses community-based "weekend schools" in Arlington, Va., to work with parents and students in a community with a large Hispanic population (Carter, http://www.ascd.org/educationnews/kids/kids072001.html). The purpose of this program was to motive parents to become more effective learners and productive citizens, to prepare parents for literacy activities to their children and to take greater interest in what happens at school, and to increase their awareness of the American educational, cultural and political realities in which they currently live. The program aimed to provide the opportunity to model the learning behavior for their children, while simultaneously improving their own lives, as well as their children’s (Osterling, 2001). The description of the program indicated that it was a program oriented towards parents. In an article written by Osterling, he simply introduced the program to readers, but failed to spend any time evaluating the effects. Though reader may form a general idea of EFTL, the outcomes of such a program remained unclear.

FIEL

2) Family Initiative for English Literacy (FIEL). This family literacy program targeted at parents of bilingual children, aiming to achieve four goals: enhancing bi-literacy of parents and children through intergenerational activities, providing information to parents regarding literacy development, enriching parents’ confidence to participate literacy activities within homes, and helping parents connect literacy activities to their own lives. In Quintero’s opinion(1990), this program was examined through taking account the four initial goals. Research found that all the goals were achieved successfully in one family, which made the results problematic. First of all, the goals of the program did not take children as the center of the literacy practice. Secondly, they failed to touch the area of how to improve the children’s native language, though they stressed the conception of whole language throughout the program. Finally, it is doubtful whether this family could be an appropriate representative of all the participatory families in the program. Based upon these questions, the outcome of this program needs special caution for generalization.

FLAME

3) Project FLAME Family Literacy Aprendiendo, Mejorando, Educando (Learning, Improving, Eucating) was designed to provide literacy training to Hispanic parents in Chicago who were not yet proficient in English so that they could support their children’s literacy learning. Several components composed the whole program: literacy modeling, literacy opportunity, interaction, and share-reading. At the same time, the program provided English as a second language instruction to parents and taught them how to foster the education success of their children. Additionally, other basic skills classes for English speaking parents also were offered to facilitate parents (Shanahan, Mulhern & Roderiguez-Brown, 1995).

Project FLAME started in Chicago and has adopted by other 29 organizations in 54 sites in British Columbia, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina and Texas 3. The effects of the program were tested each year by examining the FLAME parents’ children on factors like their letter recognition, print awareness, and the Hoehm Test of Basic Concepts (Purcell-Gates, 2000, p. 862). In 1993, Roderiguez-Brown & Mulhern found that FLAME has had an impact on the availability of literacy materials in the home and that the materials were used effectively. Parents were aware of the importance of reading to children and both parents and children enjoyed reading together. They had enhanced their home-school relationships by learning more about schools and how they could effectively work with teachers to facilitate their children’s education. In 1998, Roderiguez-Brown & Meehan continued the examination, and found statistically significant gains on each of the factors listed above.

Conclusion

As Purcell-Gates (2000) stated, the research in the field of family literacy among monolingual children was lagging behind policy and practice (p. 866), let alone the area of bilingual children. Based on the limited number of empirical studies conducted regarding bilingual children’s family literacy, we could conclude the following issues:

1. Many bilingual families have appropriate materials at home to employ family literacy.

2. Most of the parents and other family members have their specific strategies to implement family literacy and to interact with bilingual children. Reading to bilingual children may have positive effects for their literacy development.

3. The community, as a supplement to families, is uneven with respect to the opportunities that it provides for literacy development.

4. The dilemma of maintaining and losing first language of bilingual children has become a crucial and urgent problem in family literacy, as well as in bilingual education in general. However, many parents are not taking this problem seriously.

5. Reading to bilingual children may have positive effects for their bi-literacy development.

6. The literacy programs reviewed are mostly focusing on Spanish speaking families.

Of course, there are many aspects regarding the topic of bilingual children's family literacy that are less well established. For example, only a few studies have documented the link between family literacy and schooling for bilingual children. Therefore, more studies need to be done on the comparative effectiveness of family literacy that contributes to the later success in school. Moreover, many researchers have recognized the problem of first language loss among bilingual children, even though second language learning does not result in the loss of the primary language everywhere, it does often in societies like the US and Canada where linguistic or ethnic diversity is not especially valued (Fillmore, 1991, p. 341). Hence, it would be extremely helpful that more studies conducted to examine the cases where first languages are well retained on how they achieve such favorable results. Also importantly, researchers should look into the curricula of schools, both bilingual and dual-lingual, to investigate how school curriculum can be connected with family literacy so as to promote the academic success of children from non-mainstream families. As for school teachers, more interaction with students and parents would lead to easier understanding and bigger improvement of family literacy for bilingual children (Adler, in press).

References

Adler, S. (in press). Hmong home-school relations: Hmong parents and professionals speak out.

Carter, G. Is it good for the kids? "Finger Pointing" won't solve our nation's reading problems. Retrieved on July 7, 2006 from http://www.ascd.org/educationnews/kids/kids072001.html.

Encyclopedia of Children's Health: Infancy through Adolescence. http://www.healthofchildren.com/B/Bilingualism-Bilingual-Education.html.

Fillmore, L. W. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 6, 323-346.

Gregory, E. (1996). Making sense of a new world: learning to read in a second language. London: Paul Chapman.

Godina, H. (2004). Contradictory literacy practices of Mexican-background students: an ethnography from the rural Midwest. Bilingual Research Journal, 28 (2), 153-180.

Hardman, J. (1998). Literacy and bilingualism in a Cambodian community in the USA. In A.Y.Durgunoglu & L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Literacy development in a multilingual context: A cross-cultural perspective (pp. 51-81). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Hernandez, A. C. (2001). The expected and unexpected literacy outcomes of bilingual students. Bilingual Research Journal, 25 (3), 301-326.

Hinton, L. (1999). Involuntary language loss among immigrants: Asian American linguistic autobiographies. (http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/involuntary.html).

Hurst, K. (1998). Pre-school literacy experiences of children in Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati speaking families in England. British Educational Research Journal, 24(4), 415-?.

Li, G. (2002). “East is East, West is West”?: Home Literacy, Culture, and Schooling. NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Mayer, R. (2003). Learning and Instruction. New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.

McCarthey, S. J. & Garcia, G. E. (2005). English language learners’ writing practices and attitudes. Written Communication, 22(1), 36-75.

National Center for Family Literacy. http://www.famlit.org/FAQ/About/definition.cfm

Orellana, M. F., Reynolds, J., Dorner, L. & Meza, M. (2003). In other words: Translating or “para-phrasing” as a family literacy practice in immigrant households. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(1), 13-34.

Osterling, J. P., Violand-Sanchez, E., von Vacano, M. (1999). Latino families learning together. Educational Leadership, 57 (2), 64-68.

Osterling, J. P. (2001). Waking the sleeping giant: engaging and capitalizing on the sociocultural strengths of the Latino community, 'Bilingual Research Journal, 25(1-2), 59-88.

Project FLAME. http://www.uic.edu/educ/flame/flamethroughout.html

Purcell-Gates, V. (2000). Family literacy. In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (3rd ed., pp. 853-870). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Quintero, E. & Huerta-Macias, A. (1990). All in the family: bilingualism and biliteracy, The Reading Teacher, 44(4) 306-312.

Rodriguez-Brown, F. V. & Mulhern, M. M. (1993). Fostering critical literacy through family literacy: A study of families in a Mexican-immigrant community. Bilingual Research Journal, 17(3-4), 1-16.

Shanahan, T., Mulhern, M. & Rodriguez-Brown, F. (1995). Project FLAME: lessons learned from a family literacy program for linguistic minority families, The Reading Teacher, 48(7), 586-593.

Thornburg, D. G. (1993). Intergenerational literacy learning with bilingual families: a context for the analysis of social mediation of thought. Journal of Reading Behavior, 25 (3), 323-352.

Volk, D. (1999). “The teaching and the enjoyment and being together...”: sibling teaching in the family of a Puerto Rican kindergartner. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 14 (1), 5-34.

Wong, M. G. (1989). Model students? Teachers’ perceptions and expectations of their Asian students and White students. Sociology of Education, 53, 236-246.

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[1] http://www.famlit.org/AboutNCFL/PressRoom/NCFLFactSheets/federal.cfm

[2] http://www.healthofchildren.com/B/Bilingualism-Bilingual-Education.html

[3] http://www.uic.edu/educ/flame/flamethroughout.html

Signed Life experiences, testimonies and stories

My brother-in-law is Mexican and speaks both English and Spanish fluently. He was raised hearing both languages almost equally in the home. As a result, he was able to attain a higher position in his current job as a Deputy Sheriff and makes more money than a mono-lingual Deputy Sheriff makes in the same county. My sister and brother-in-law now have two children, both of whom they are raising hearing both languages in the home. My sister, who took French in high school, is finding it difficult, much more so than her children, to pick up on the language. Most of the time, the children hear Spanish from my brother-in-law and English from my sister. My nephew is almost three, and can count to ten and say the alphabet in both languages. I cannot see a downside to multilingual family literacy. When both my niece and nephew are grown adults, they will be fluent in two lanugages and much more marketable. They also will have a very familiar appreciation of both cultures and therefore of each of the diverse differences. Kelly